Norwegians maintaining composure despite attack

Terrorist's goal of fragmenting society is failing

by Shawn Pogatchnik - Jul. 26, 2011 12:00 AMAssociated Press

OSLO, Norway - Confessed terrorist Anders Behring Breivik hoped to trigger a nationalist revolution in Norway. But his double act of mass murder and destruction seems to have stirred only dignified defiance in this wealthy, idealistic nation renowned for its commitment to peace.

The capital's heart remains shattered and cordoned off since Friday's car-bomb blast. Communities up and down this sparsely populated land of fir forests and mist-shrouded fjords have yet to bury their 76 loved ones - a figure downgraded from a previously higher estimate - mostly slain as Breivik gunned down defenseless teens and young adults at an island retreat of the governing Labor Party.

But families, workmates and communities are coming together to discuss the need for Norway to protect the best of what it is: a tolerant society open to the world. Many even expressed a paradoxical sense of relief that it was a local, not an al-Qaida outsider, who sought to turn their well-ordered world upside down.

"These quite unimaginable attacks have challenged our national character, but they will not be able to alter our national characteristics," said Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute, which helps select the winner of each year's Peace Prize in Oslo.

Whereas other nations struck by terror have responded quickly with heavy security-force deployments and clampdowns on civil liberties, that is not apparent in Norway today.

What remains so striking to a foreign visitor is how calm and how easily accessible Norwegian citizens and institutions remain.

It is the public at large that has mobilized in support of the forces of reason, moderation and sharing the burden of grief.

"It will take a long time for people to grasp the vastness of this atrocity. But people are seeking answers together. They are seeking the community of others, the warmth and support of each other," the Rev. Carl Petter Opsahl said in a speech Monday in the square beside Oslo Cathedral.

He spoke shortly after more than 10,000 people crowded into the spot, beside a sea of floral bouquets and handwritten tributes to the innocent dead, to observe a minute's silence.

The sea of faces included Oslo citizens of every color and faith, reflecting the rapid demographic shifts under way as Norway's liberal government offers an open door to asylum-seekers from war-torn parts of Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Today, about a 10th of Norway's 4.9 million residents are foreign-born and about 5 percent Muslim, still far below the norm for Europe. Most, particularly those from predominantly Muslim nations, have arrived since the mid-1990s - a sudden shift that the profoundly Islamophobic writings of Breivik, 32, denounced as something to be feared and fought.

Many Norwegians concede this is the key fault line lying deep, and until now dormant, beneath their society.

"We would be looking today at a truly unstabilized Norway if the attacks had been committed by a heavily bearded al-Qaida activist who had just been offered asylum here. But no, our true demon turns out to be this clean-cut, middle-class boy from the suburbs of Oslo, a 100 percent product of Norway," said Thomas Hylland Eriksen, an anthropologist at the University of Oslo.